Well meaning, but ineffective (at least initially). When it comes to panel shows, the presence of one woman in and of itself isn’t enough - the show can still appear 90 to 100% blokey either because the woman is intimidated or talked over by the men, or she holds her own but gets cut out in the edit.
I have a vague (it was years ago now, so don’t quote me on this) recollection of seeing Katherine Ryan was on an episode of Mock the Week, and being awfully disappointed when I watched it because she hardly seemed to say anything and was mostly shown laughing at the jokes made by the blokes.
Taskmaster has made a better fist of it since they updated their minimum to two women per series. Much harder to cut them out, and it seems to make it easier for them to banter (they’re a woman on the show, not the woman). But (as was loudly made clear to me when I cited Taskmaster as an improvement) it’s still not good enough. To a certain extent, I agree - I’d love to see a Taskmaster series where there’s only one male contestant. But as it stands, they’re still better than many panel shows.
The best mix, though, is always to be found on Frankie Boyle’s shows. He does an amazing job of getting women on and letting them show how great they are. I wish everyone could provide the platform that Frankie does.
I think what a lot of people may not realise is that panel shows can be hugely cliqued, hugely adversarial, and hugely unwelcoming places to women. The ‘one token woman’ policy can actually exacerbate that rather than make it better, if there isn’t anything done to help them actually integrate. Instead of forcing women into old panel formats, why not kill the old formats and create new ones instead? There’s a part of me that doesn’t understand why Have I Got News For You apparently has to exist forever, for example (and to a lesser degree, Mock the Week). More new things, please.
tl;dr, Jaysis its complicated.